SWANN "UCTI, NS Julia Margaret Cameron, Mrs. Duckworth, albumen print, 1867. Estimate $20,000 to $3 0 ,000. At auction Feb 10. V/ , "'iI . Mon Peb 10 100 Fine 10:3oam Photographs Illustrated Catalogue: $35 Inquiries: Daile Kaplan dkaplan@swanngalleries.com Thur Peb 13 Travel & Exploration 10:3oam Catalogue: $15 Inquiries: Tobias Abeloff tabeloff@swanngalleries.com Complete schedule and catalogues online at www.swanngallerles.com. AUTOGRAPHS BOOKS/MANUSCRIPTS Swann Galleries, Inc. MAPS/ ATLASES 10 4 East 25th Street PHOTOGRAPHS New York, NY 10010 POSTERS 212 254 47 10 "- A.._ , '. , , WORKS OF ART ON PAPER Fax: 212 979 1017 ''' ".. : ...... op. ", '''' " " ... , '.', , ,;i ,_ , '1, .' ,c ,. : -.J, I )." );..:: .:. : '. ., 'i . '- ,,:', ,: lit ; , i .1 i I )r; ' .... . - 0; ft -,\"., t " SPACE, LIGHT & NATURAL MATERIALS MAKE OUR AWARD.WINNING HOMES. 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Kell)T, Assis- tant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, flew to Pyongyang with a large entourage for a showdown over the uranium-enrichment program. The agenda was, inevitabl)T, shaped byof- ficials' awareness of the President's strong personal views. "There was a huge fight over whether to give the North Koreans an ultimatum or to negotiate," one Amer- ican expert on Korea told me. "Which is the same fight they're having now." Kelly was authorized to tell the Koreans that the U.S. had learned about the illicit uranium program, but his careful instruc- tions left him no room to negotiate. His scripted message was blunt: North Korea must stop the program before any negoti- ations could take place. "This is a sad tale of bureaucracy;" another American ex- pert said. "The script Kelly had was writ- ten in the N.S.C."-the National Secu- rity Council-"by hard-liners. I don't think the President wanted a crisis at this time." The C.I.A. report had predicted that North Korea, if confronted with the evidence, would not risk an open break with the 1994 agreement and would do nothing to violate the nonproliferation treaty: "It was dead wrong," an intelli- gence officer told me. "I hope there are other people in the agency who under- stand the North Koreans better than the people who wrote this." "The Koreans were stunned," a J apa- nese diplomat who spoke to some of the participants told me. "They didn't know that the U.S. knew what it knew." Mter an all-night caucus in Pyongyang, Kang SukJu, the First Vice Foreign Minister of North Korea, seemed to confirm the charge when he responded by insisting upon his nation's right to develop nu- clear weapons. What he didn't talk about was whether it actually had any: Kang Suk Ju also accused the United States, the Japanese diplomat said, of "threaten- ing North Koreàs survival." Kang then I produced a list of the United States' al- leged failures to meet its own obliga- tions under the 1994 agreement, and of- fered to shut down the enrichment pro- gram in return for an American promise not to attack and a commitment to nor- malize relations. Kelly, constrained by his instructions, could oilly re-state his brief: the North Koreans must act first. The impasse was on. But, as with the June C.I.A. report, the Administration kept quiet about the Pyongyang admission. It did not inform the public until October 16th, five days after Congress voted to authorize mili- tary force against Iraq. Even then, ac- cording to Administration sources quoted in the Washington Post, the Administra- tion went public oilly after learning that the North Korean admission-with obvious implications for the debate on Iraq-was being leaked to the press. On the CBS program "Face the Nation" on October 20th, Condoleezza Rice denied that news of the Kelly meeting had been deliberately withheld until after the vote. President Bush, she said, simply hadn't been presented with options until Oc- tober 15th. "What was surprising to us was not that there was a program," Rice said. "What was surprising to us was that the North Koreans admitted there was a " program. "Did we want them to deny it?" a for- mer American intelligence expert on North Korea asked me afterward. He said, "I could never understand what was going on with the North Korea policy:" Referring to relations between the intel- ligence service and the Bush Adminis- tration, he said, "We couldn't get people's attention, and, even if we could, they never had a sensible approach. The Ad- ministration was deepl)T, viciously ideo- logical." It was contemptuous not oillyof the Pyongyang government but of earlier efforts by the Clinton White House to address the problem of nuclear prolifera- tion-a problem that could only get worse if Washington ignored it. The for- mer intelligence official told me, "When it came time to confront North Korea, we had no plan, no contact-nothing to ne- gotiate with. You have to be in constant diplomatic contact, so you can engage and be in the strongest position to solve the problem. But we let it all fall apart." The fonner intelligence official added, referring to the confrontation in North Korea in October, "The Kelly meeting and